It all started that horrible night. Uncle John had just stopped by for dinner without any sort of prior warning sporting that silly grin he always had plastered on his face and carrying a pack of beers to share that were no doubt the reason why he was developing such a rotund shape.

Aunty Charlotte had been cracking down on his unhealthy vice, so uncle John had started to use his casual visits to them as a way to indulge on his favorite beverage – away from her prying eyes.

Uncle John would often show up by surprise like that for as long as Lara could remember. He said that the unexpectedness made the visit more exciting, and the good surprise an overall more enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

Normally she agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but how she hated it now. If not for the untimely appearance of her uncle, she would still be together with her dad and everything would be fine. Well, maybe not exactly fine but it would definitely be better than how things stood now. At the very least, she wouldn’t be here in this house all alone, not knowing what to do.

Not long after her uncle arrived and she and her Pa set the table for them all, the ground started shaking fiercely. They all had to throw themselves to the floor and seek cover, or risk getting hit by any falling furniture and other random stuff.

Fortunately, their house was very sturdy and it would take more than a few tremors to topple the building.

The place had been built by one of her grandparents from the ground-up, and given that her family had quite a few accomplished carpenters and builders in its history – including uncle John who was responsible for most of its renovations and repairs –, it was no surprise that the building managed to coast through the quakes pretty much unscathed.

That wasn’t the end of their troubles however.

Very soon they discovered that their phones had no service anymore and that their power supply had also been cut after the turmoil. They did have a backup generator for emergencies though, but that did nothing to alleviate their concerns.

Uncle John was already fidgety by this point, as not being able to talk to his family and check if they were okay was making him extremely worried for their safety.

Her father was trying to stop him from jumping up the truck and driving there during the dark hours – saying that uncle John would be of no use to anybody if he got himself in a car accident and ended up in a ditch somewhere –, when they heard the first screams of that night from the distance.

At first, they thought someone had gotten injured during the quakes or was trapped and was yelling for help, but soon they realized it was something much, much worse instead.

The bloodcurdling and hair-raising cries that followed sent shivers down her spine and still gave her nightmares. Something terrible was unfolding and the dark of the night prevented them from finding out what exactly.

Very quickly her father managed to pull his brother inside. Even as anxious and worried about his family as he was, uncle John could tell they were facing an unprecedented crisis, so insisting on leaving now would be no more than plain and simple stupidity.

Together they all barricaded themselves inside while her dad grabbed his shotgun, just in case they needed it.

They didn’t know what to expect, but from what they heard, it seemed that something or someone was out there hunting people down, so they needed something to protect themselves with.

Besides the fraying of their nerves, not much else happened during the rest of that night. No one came around to check on them or to attack them until the dawn of the next day.

After the sun came up and it became bright outside once more, her tired father and uncle – from a night of no sleep – got into uncle john’s truck and went to investigate what was going on while she stayed behind to look after the house until they returned.

It didn’t take long for them to come back though, telling unbelievable stories of the dead rising up again and attacking the living. Of widespread panic and mayhem.

They were fortunate in that they were fairly isolated from the rest of the world in this house, since things were grimmer the closer you got to the city according to her father.

It seemed like something out of a horror movie. It was as if the Apocalypse had arrived and mankind would have to pay for its sins at long last as the Bible prophesized.

Lara and her family weren’t devout believers. They believed in God like most other folks around the area, but they hardly ever went to church. However, when faced with such a ludicrous situation, Lara and the other two couldn’t help but feel they were witnessing the biblical end of days as it unfolded.

That didn’t mean they would simply give up living and wait for their turn to be judged. What if they were wrong and the zombies were the product of some sort of bizarre virus mutation or some kind of slip up caused by a secret government project that went out of control like many movie scripts have portrayed before?

Crazier things have happened before, right?

Therefore, after everyone took some time to get a quick shuteye – they rested in turns in order to make sure there was always someone awoke to keep a lookout while the others slept –, they gathered together and held a discussion about what to do going forward.

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Uncle John desperately wanted to go after his family and make sure they were okay, obviously. The worsening of the situation only served to make his worry for his family to grow bigger.

Her father was in support of that and so was she. As family, they had to look out after one another. Family came first.

They all decided it would be best to pick up aunty Charlotte and Lara’s cousin and bring them back here, since her father’s house was better suited to accommodate them all.

The ranch could provide them with all the necessities they needed to survive long-term once they managed to make the trip back here safely. From food to water and even power, they had it all covered in this place.

However, although all three of them felt the need to go and fetch uncle John’s family, they soon started to argue about how they would go about doing it.

Lara wanted to go with them, but her father and uncle would have none of it. They said it would be too dangerous and that they needed to leave someone behind to make sure that no one took advantage of their absence to loot the place, and to keep everything in working condition for when they returned.

It made sense at the time to leave someone behind to protect their home, regardless of how she felt about it. Thus, outvoted and outnumbered, Lara could do nothing but watch as her father and uncle left her behind all alone, with only a hunting rifle to protect herself with.

Nowadays she hated herself for not throwing herself in front of the car until they let her join them on the trip. No matter what was reasonable or not, she wouldn’t be all alone now if she had done so at the very least.

No matter what fate had befallen them, anything was better than not knowing, than simply waiting.

Was this how people felt when phones hadn’t been invented yet and family members went somewhere far away? Was this how waiting for someone to return from war was like?

How could anyone live like this? How could they keep going while dealing with the crippling anxiety at the same time? Lara didn’t know. She could barely keep it together after a couple of weeks, not to mention months or years.

Maybe she was just weak, Lara told herself.

Lara rested her tear-stained cheek on her knees and looked sideways at the hunting rifle that laid on the floor by her side.

There had been many instances of zombies coming over to their property during the last few days, but never in large numbers. Therefore, Lara had no trouble to dispose of all of them with minimum ammo wastage.

She was a decent shot, all things considered, even if she was not particularly fond of firearms and all that shooting and hunting jazz. Her father enjoyed engaging in those sorts of activities very much though, and frequently went out with her uncle to do so.

Lara also accompanied them a few times – mainly just to accompany them and put a smile upon their faces as she let them talk excitedly for hours about their hobbies – and was taught all she needed to know about how to maintain and operate a firearm, so it was not surprising that she could hold her ground fairly well against the undead trespassers.

She also had been spending most of her days looking at the distance through the rifle’s scope, hoping fruitlessly to catch a glimpse of her uncle’s truck speeding down the dirt road towards her, or to see her family’s faces, tired from the journey, finally coming back home.

It wasn’t meant to be. At the very least, it hasn’t happened yet. All she managed to find through the lenses were more and more enemies. Not even a single living person had graced her eyes with their presence.

Lara had begun to wonder if she was the only person left alive, of if she was trapped in an unending dream, cursed to suffer from loneliness for all eternity. She even begun to question her sanity.

Maybe this was her own personal hell. Maybe it truly was the biblical Apocalypse and she was poorly judged, condemned to an eternity of solitude while the madness and despair slowly encroached on her mind, draining her of reason and strength, finally leaving her a mere husk of what she once was.

Different people were weak to different things. Lara found out the hard way that she was particularly vulnerable to the not-knowing anxiety accompanied by the fear of being left alone.

Someone else might do better in those circumstances, but who could truly blame her for her insufficiencies? She was only human.

“Get a grip girl! You can’t be moping about all day long! What would dad say if he saw you like this?” Lara wiped of her tears with her forearm angrily, and slapped her face with both hands a few times for good measure. She had to snap out of it.

She couldn’t give up on hope just yet. They were counting on her to keep their house protected, to have somewhere to come back to when they managed to deal with whatever it was that kept holding them for so long.

At least that was what Lara told herself to lift her spirits.

She then sought the comfort of the routine she already knew. She had already taken care of all the chores she could think of that were needed to keep the ranch in working condition, so all that was left was to keep watch.

She picked up her hunting rifle and went to the window on the second floor that gave her the best vantage point of the ranch’s perimeter and started to scope for anything of notice, hoping to finally put her eyes today on what she so desperately wanted to see. The return of her family.

Lara absentmindedly started the usual motions of tracing the horizon through the zooming lenses of her rifle until she had looked everywhere she could think of. Then she started all over again. Rinse and repeat.

Doing it all repeatedly had already become second nature to her, so it barely took her any focus to keep up with the lookout. The action barely distracted her enough to keep the dark thoughts at bay, but it was all she had going for herself at the moment.

Despite her hopes to the contrary, Lara was convinced that today would be an extension of the previous day and the day before that, with nothing new going on until the stars dotted the skies again and she was forced into another sleepless night full of nightmares and apprehension.

However, she was soon proven wrong as she spotted movement in the distance. It wasn’t her family coming back though, neither it was another new zombie to add his number to her kill count.

Instead, through the aiming apparatus, Lara finally found proof that she was not the last person alive on Earth. A young man with dark-brown hair and eyes, that she estimated was just slightly taller than herself, was cautiously making his way towards her ranch.

He had a bag strapped on his back and also carried a hammer that looked to have seen its fair share of use on his right hand.

Lara tried to suppress her enthusiasm from seeing a living and breathing person for the first time in weeks. After all, whether this would be a positive encounter or a negative one was still up to debate.

Just because someone was human, it didn’t mean they held good intentions towards you. Lara wasn’t some naïve young lass. If he was friend of foe, only time would tell.

Still, Lara desperately wished that her first contact ever since those tiring days started would be a good one. She needed a win. Badly.